New international agreements often recycle language from previous agreements, using boilerplate solutions alongside customized provisions. The presence of boilerplate in international agreements has important implications for understanding how international rules are made. The determinants behind boilerplate in interna- tional agreements have not previously been systematically evaluated. Using original data from a sample of 348 preferential trade agreements (PTAs) adopted between 1989 and 2009, we combine novel text analysis measures with Latent Order Logistic Graph (LOLOG) network techniques to assess the determinants behind boilerplate in labor and environmental provisions commonly found in PTAs. Our results indicate that whereas boilerplate can be used for both efficiency and distributive purposes, international boilerplate is used primarily for efficiency gains while power-distribution considerations are not systematically important.

An increasingly comprehensive set of environmental provisions is being integrated in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Interestingly, while a number of these environmental provisions are included only rarely, others are duplicated in more than 100 PTAs. We still lack a convincing explanation for the conditions that fuel the uptake of specific provisions. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the design, interaction, and diffusion of international institutions and introduces two key innovations. First, our level of analysis is the provision level rather than the agreement level. Second, while the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate what makes diffusion more likely. We hypothesise that the initial conditions – relating both to agency and institutional factors – under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion. Our results indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often, and provisions first introduced by environmentally credible countries are more frequently duplicated than provisions introduced by economically powerful countries.

This collection of essays brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological interests but all active on the topic of complex systems as applied to international relations. They investigate how complex systems have been and can be applied in practice and what differences it makes for the study of international affairs. Two important threads link all the contributions: (i) To which extent is this approach promising to understand global governance dynamics? (ii) How can this be implemented in practice?

The Group of Seven (G7) leaders met for their 44th annual summit in Charlevoix, Canada in June 2018. Although the G7 has outlived many institutions of global governance, perennial doubts are cast upon it, particularly regarding its legitimacy and achievements. The Think 7/Idées 7 is a group of 35 scholars from all over the world who met from 21 to 23 May, 2018 at Laval University, Quebec City to identify key themes to be addressed at the Charlevoix Summit, communicating its findings to the G7 leaders’ personal representatives. This Policy Insights paper builds on these discussions and looks ahead to the 2019 Biarritz Summit by making recommendations of how the G7 can play a leadership role. We argue that it should address new, unprecedented and highly disruptive issues that characterise our complex world, rather than well-understood international problems that fit into existing categories. We argue that the G7 can do this by playing to its strengths – informality and like-mindedness in particular – in addressing emerging and transversal issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrencies.

While policymakers often make bold claims on the positive impact of intellectual property (IP) rights on both developed and developing country economies, the empirical literature is more ambiguous. IP rights have both incentive and inhibitory effects that are difficult to isolate in the abstract and dependent on economic context. To unravel these contradictory effects, this article introduces an index that evaluates the strength of IP protection in 124 developing countries for the years 1995 to 2011. We illustrate the value of this index to economics study and show evidence that is consistent with IP leading to increased growth. Our results are further consistent with two causal pathways highlighted in the literature: that IP leads to greater levels of technology transfer and increased domestic inventive activity. Yet, other aspects of our study fit uneasily with this simple story. We find, for example, evidence suggesting that increased levels of growth lead to greater levels of IP protection, contradictory evidence in the literature linking IP with growth, a lack of evidence that increased levels of IP protection lead to actual use of the IP system and problems with what IP indexes measure. Because of this, we suggest another – and so far undertheorized – explanation of the links between IP and growth: that IP may have few direct effects on growth and that any causality is due to belief rather than actual deployment of IP.

This article introduces a new dataset on the intellectual property (IP) provisions included in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and makes it available for research and policy communities alike. Several PTAs include IP commitments that go well beyond the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). A sound knowledge of these TRIPs-plus commitments is essential in order to improve our understanding of what drives them and of their legal, social and economic consequences. Yet, until now, these provisions have not been mapped in a comprehensive and systematic way. The T+PTA dataset fills this gap by documenting the existence of 90 types of IP provisions in 126 agreements signed between 1991 and 2016. We show that, even for like-minded countries, significant variations exist in their reliance on TRIPs-plus provisions, their degree of consistency across PTAs, and their preferences for some IP rights. We also find that strong TRIPs-Plus provisions are correlated with the depth of PTAs, the asymmetry between trade partners, and the strength of their domestic IP law. By making the T+PTA dataset available, we hope to create the opportunity for a new generation of research on TRIPs-plus agreements.

Bilateral and regional trade deals frequently include patent provisions that go beyond the minimum requirement of the multilateral Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). They extend the scope of patentability and provide additional rights to patent holders. This paper systematically maps these “TRIPs-plus” agreements. Exploiting a new dataset, 52 TRIPs-plus agreements are found to have been concluded between 1990 and 2017. The major proponents of these TRIPs-plus agreements on patents are the United States, followed by the European Union and the European Free Trade Association. Other technology-rich countries, such as Japan and Korea, have surprisingly few TRIPs-plus provisions on patent protection in their trade agreements. Few South-South trade agreements include TRIPs-plus provisions, but some include TRIPs-extra provisions on genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Having a clear picture of these TRIPs-plus agreements is essential as they can have important social and economic consequences, including for the development of innovations and access to technologies.

This research studies the allocation of World Bank loans with panel data covering up to 115 countries over three time periods: Cold War (1973-1990), post-Cold War (1991-2000), and post-September 11 (2001-2013). Among our findings, we show that the more a state receives a large amount of loans by the World Bank, the more it supports the US foreign policy. At the same time, our data reveals that recipients of World Bank loans are on average closer to Russian foreign policy than American foreign policy for all periods under consideration. We argue that these results provide evidence that World Bank’s loans are used to buy and reward supports or abstentions for specific resolutions in the United Nations rather than for all the ones adopted in a session. Our study furthermore indicates that after September 11 terrorist attacks, World Bank recipient countries receiving the greatest amount of US military assistance were also the ones receiving the largest loans by the Bank. Although this supports the thesis that the events of 9/11 led the United States to use the World Bank in their national interests as during the Cold War, we find that the Bank appears to have limited political considerations in the allocation of its loans after the collapse of the USSR and especially between 2001 and 2013.

When international organizations expand and proliferate, why do they fail to spread more evenly in their policy sphere? To answer this question, this article builds on organizational ecology theory, which was recently introduced into the study of international organizations. However, rather than studying each population separately, as previous studies have done, this article investigates how distinct populations with overlapping niches shape each other’s evolution. It argues that when inter-population competition occurs, the first population to occupy its niche at a high density limits the long-term development of other populations. This is the case even if emerging populations may temporarily enjoy a higher growth rate. The argument is illustrated by a study of the relations between four populations of technical assistance providers in the field of intellectual property. By doing so, the article brings for the first time inter-population relations in the study of international organizations and provides an explanation for the persistent concentration of international organizations in specific areas of the governance space.

This research studies the allocation of World Bank loans with panel data covering up to 115 countries over three time periods: Cold War (1973-1990), post-Cold War (1991-2000), and post-September 11 (2001-2013). Among our findings, we show that the more a state receives a large amount of loans by the World Bank, the more it supports the US foreign policy. At the same time, our data reveals that recipients of World Bank loans are on average closer to Russian foreign policy than American foreign policy for all periods under consideration. We argue that these results provide evidence that World Bank's loans are used to buy and reward support or abstention for specific resolutions at the United Nations rather than for all the ones adopted in a session.

This briefing paper discusses how provisions on environmental cooperation in trade agreements can contribute to better environmental outcomes. It is frequently assumed that the more enforceable environmental commitments are, the more likely governments are to take action to protect the environment. This assumption leads several experts to argue in favour of strong sanction-based mechanisms of dispute settlement in order to ensure the implementation of trade agreements’ environmental provisions. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that softer provisions can result in increased environmental cooperation, which can in turn favour domestic environmental protection. To shed light on this debate, this paper examines the design and the implementation of cooperative environmental provisions of trade agreements.

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are increasingly referred to within trade agreements. The range of MEAs cited in trade agreements is also expanding.

MEAs within trade agreements are referred to for different reasons, including to provide contextual information for interpretative purposes, to determine hierarchy between agreements, to promote the ratification of MEAs or to demand their implementation

Using data obtained from the Trade and Environment Database (TREND), this policy brief shows that the practice of referencing MEAs in trade agreements creates significant political and legal opportunities for enhanced MEA effectiveness.

Environment and trade are increasingly linked through preferential trade agreements. Despite the encompassing nature of environmental provisions in trade agreements, studies on causes and consequences of the trade and environment linkage are scarce. A main cause hindering research in this area is the lack of data. By dint of this research note we introduce an original dataset on environmental provisions found in 630 trade agreements signed between 1947 and 2016 – that is the most comprehensive in terms of both variables coded and agreements covered. We illustrate the dataset’s usefulness by assessing the question of why countries include environmental provisions in trade agreements. Are trade negotiations opportunities to promote stringent environmental standards? Or are environmental provisions window-dressing covering protectionist interests? We find evidence that democracies, countries that face import competition, and countries that care about the environment are more likely to include environmental provisions in trade agreements. The database is of particular relevance for research on international institutional design, policy innovation, regime complexity, policy diffusion, and regime effectiveness.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) cover a much wider diversity of environmental clauses than World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. Which PTA environmental clauses could be multilateralized and included in the WTO rulebook? This chapter compares five different scenarios for the potential multilateralization of PTA environmental clauses: 1) The “routine scenario” combines the most frequent clauses; 2) Tthe “consensual scenario” includes the clauses accepted by a high number of WTO members; 3) the “trendy scenario” includes the most popular clauses in recent times; 4) “the power-game scenario” combines the clauses that are jointly supported by the US and the EU; 5) the “appropriate scenario” is a compilation of the clauses typically included in large membership agreements. This chapter compares and contrasts the scenarios’ implications and identifies their common ground. Although each scenario represents an ideal type unlikely to materialize, the comparison offers insights into how the multilateral trade system could be developed to improve the integration of environmental concerns.

Greening projects lead by civic actors at the urban scale spur transformation through example and through gradual adjustment of processes. Questions remain on how such projects are put into action and on what make them work. How do civic experiments reflect the ongoing change in urban governance and practices? We focus on a qualitative study of two greening initiatives lead by civic groups in Quebec City (Quebec, Canada). The case studies are analysed through the lens of theories that approach civic action and climate experiments as new modes of urban governance. We conclude that civil society groups have the capacity to intervene directly on the urban environment in order to enhance its quality. Findings reveal that informal greening initiatives contribute to a civic narrative in favour of adaptation to climate change at the local scale.

This book presents the evolution of the field of foreign policy analysis and explains the theories that have structured research in this area over the last 50 years. It provides the essentials of emerging theoretical trends, data and methodological pitfalls and major case-studies and is designed to be a key entry point for graduate students, upper-level undergraduates and scholars into the discipline. The volume features an eclectic panorama of different conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to foreign political analysis, focusing on different models of analysis such as two-level game analysis, bureaucratic politics, strategic culture, cybernetics, poliheuristic analysis, cognitive mapping, gender studies, groupthink and the systemic sources of foreign policy. The authors also clarify conceptual notions such as doctrines, ideologies and national interest, through the lenses of foreign policy analysis.

The regulatory contribution that Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) make to global climate governance is assessed through an analysis of climate-related provisions found in 688 PTAs signed between 1947 and 2016. Provisions are analyzed along four dimensions: innovation, legalization, replication, and distribution. Innovative climate provisions are found in several PTAs that are in some cases more specific and enforceable than the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Nonetheless, these climate provisions offer limited progress because they remain weakly ‘legalized’, fail to replicate broadly in the global trade system, and were not adopted by the largest greenhouse gas emitters. Despite the inclusion of innovative climate provisions in a number of PTAs, their poor design and weak replication position them as some of the weakest environmental provisions within PTAs.

Rising economies face a crucial dilemma when establishing their position on international patent law. Should they translate their increasing economic strength into political power to further developing countries’ interests in lower levels of international patent protection? Or, anticipating a rising domestic interest in stronger international patent protection, should they adopt a position that favors maximal patent protection? Drawing on multiple case studies using a most similar system design, we argue that rising economies, after having been coerced into adopting more stringent patent standards, tend to display ambivalent positions, trapped in bureaucratic politics and caught between conflicting domestic constituencies. We find that the recent proliferation of international institutions and the expansion of transnational networks have contributed to fragmentation and polarization in domestic patent politics. As a result, today’s emerging economies experience a more tortuous transformative process than did yesterday’s. This finding is of particular relevance for scholars studying rising powers, as well as for those working on policy diffusion, regulatory regimes, transnational networks and regime complexes.

2017

Trade agreements contain an increasing number of environmental provisions. Some of these provisions now relate to precise environmental issues, such as biodiversity or hazardous waste management. Certain trade agreements even devote entire chapters to environmental protection. However, the rate of innovative environmental clauses per agreement has declined over the years. This paper draws attention to some of the lesser-known provisions encountered in five agreements or fewer. These “legal one-hit wonders” do not often reach the billboard, despite their uniqueness and creativity. The objective of this paper is to put the spotlight on them in the hope of contributing to the diffusion of best practices, providing negotiators with ideas to emulate in future trade agreements. It also reveals some of the weak spots in the interplay between trade and environment.

The 2009 Lisbon Treaty transferred the competence over Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policy from the national to the supranational level. This article analyses the impact of this transfer on the content of international investment agreements and, more broadly, the shape of the investment regime complex. Is the competence shift expected to have an independent impact or simply reproduce and continue existing trends? Exploring these two conjectures through a combination of text analysis, primary materials, and interviews, we are making a Historical Institutionalist argument focusing on the timing and sequencing of international investment negotiations. While the competence shift has allowed the EU to innovate in developing its own approach to negotiating international investment agreements, notably with the proposal to create an Investment Court System, the novelty may be only at the surface as the constraints of past, current, and future negotiations restrict the options available to EU actors- we call this the space-time continuum. The result of this learning-and-reacting process is a new European approach which simultaneously duplicates and innovates and could eventually favour greater centralization within the investment regime complex.

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) include several environmental clauses in their respective preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Building on an exhaustive and fine-grained dataset of PTAs environmental clauses, this article makes two contributions. First, it show that the US and the EU have initially favored different approaches to environmental protection in their PTAs. US concerns over regulatory sovereignty and level playing field have conducted to a legalistic and adversarial approach, while EU concerns for policy coherence have led to a more procedural and cooperative approach. Second, this article provides evidence that European and American trade negotiators have gradually converged on a shared set of environmental norms. Although the US and the EU initially pursued different objectives, they learned from each other and drew similar lessons. As a result, recent American agreements have become more European-like, and European agreements have become more Americanized. This article concludes that US and EU approaches, far from being incompatible, can usefully be combined and reinforce each other.

While the trade regime is often analyzed under the metaphoric assumptions of Newtonian mechanics, we propose an alternative, more organic representation. We argue that the trade regime seems to evolve as a complex adaptive system, at the edge of order and chaos. Drawing from a dataset of 280 different types of environmental provisions found in 680 trade agreements, we show how both the trade regime and the norms contained therein unfold by remaining stable (but not static) and dynamic (but not chaotic). Trade negotiators simultaneously explore new grounds by introducing legal innovations and exploiting known territories by adopting existing norms. Our analysis suggests that, even as the regime grows in the number and length of agreements, there are exploratory and exploitative processes at work. These twin processes can explain that the trade regime appears neither more fragmented/heterogeneous nor more centralized/homogenous than it was fifty years ago, despite its substantial expansion. This hypothesis is at the core of the research agenda that this paper lays out.

In the 1990s, a discourse emerged within global environmental change research underlining the need to go beyond previously held boundaries between science and society. While not entirely new, this discourse has however reached the highest levels of scientific cooperation embodied among others in the Future Earth (FE) platform and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Using the concept of (anti)-boundary work developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we trace shifts in discourses about the boundaries between social and natural disciplines; between scientists and societal actors; and finally, between the definition of problems and the provision of solutions. We do so analyzing the emergence of global sustainability and solution-oriented science in the discourses of scientific and political actors involved in FE and the IPCC. We conclude with a discussion of challenges connected to the implementation of solution-oriented research and assessment. This article is part of a special issue on solution-oriented GEAs.

Highlights

• Solution-oriented research and assessment are transforming the role of science in society.

• It challenges boundaries between social and natural disciplines; experts and social actors; problems and solutions.

• Illustrations of anti-boundary discourses are given in Future Earth and IPCC.

2016

A growing number of trade agreements include provisions related to access to genetic resources and the sharing of the benefits that arise out of their utilization. This paper maps the distribution and the diversity of these provisions. It identifies a great variety of provisions regarding sovereignty over genetic resources, the protection of traditional knowledge, prior informed consent, the disclosure of origin in patent applications and conditions for bioprospecting activities. It also finds that some recent trade agreements provide specific measures designed to facilitate the implementation of access and benefit-sharing (ABS) provisions, including measures related to technical assistance, transparency and dispute settlements. Thus, it appears that trade negotiations can become vectors for the implementation of ABS obligations stemming from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization. The integration of ABS commitments into trade agreements, however, varies greatly, depending on the countries involved. While Latin American countries have played a pioneering role, Canada and the United States still lag behind. The most exemplary ABS standards are not yet widely used, perhaps because they remain little known. These provisions deserve greater attention and should be integrated more widely into international trade agreements.

The European Union is a pioneer in terms of integrating climate issues into trade negotiations. It is the actor that includes the greatest number and range of provisions related climate change in its trade agreements.However, the EU model does not seem to be inspiring other actors in the trade system. Despite the recent proliferation of trade agreements and the exponential increase in provisions relating to the environment in these agreements, few countries are taking inspiration from EU standards.In order to foster an integrated approach to climate change, it would be useful to reproduce on a broader scale the small number of existing climate provisions, and to innovate based on progress made for other environmental issues.

Foreign investment law (FIL) went through a tremendous evolution in the past two decades. With more than 3 000 agreements and a large corpus of case-law, some would qualify it as a chaotic and unstable system. Divergences between agreements and past arbitral decisions undoubtedly strengthen this perception. Nonetheless, this article on the development of the new European model for negotiating investment agreements following the Lisbon Treaty outlines that FIL is dynamically stable over time. In other words, while being flexible and opened for incremental changes, the investment regime also fosters a repetition of pre-existing norms. In fact, the recent text of the investment chapter of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) shows that even though the European Commission had the opportunity to innovate, the existing institutional complex surrounding FIL including, but not solely the American treaty model, largely inspired it.

This book examines recent developments in political science research. What are the new influences to which the discipline opens itself up? Is political science research converging towards a single model or splitting into different streams? What are the new challenges at the beginning of the 21st century? By addressing these questions, this collection of essays discusses three interrelated topics: the relationship between political science and the problems of politics, the relationship between political science and other fields of research, and the transformation of the profession. In so doing, this volume traces the major trends in contemporary political science research since the end of the Cold War.

As part of this approach, the authors rely on the academic journals as a field of investigation. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a different journal, including the American Political ScienceReview,West European Politics, the British Political Science Review, Security Dialogue, the Journal of Common Market Studies, International Security, Electoral Studies and the Revue française de science politique.

The book is intended to scholars with an interest in the historiography of political science, the epistemology of knowledge, the sociology of the profession as well as the evolution of the field in terms of research agendas, theoretical approaches and methodological debates.

The doctrine Paul Gérin-Lajoie launched in April 1965 is not intended to extend to international trade nor to the protection of investments. Indeed, the reading of the 1867 Constitutional Act convinces its readers that it is difficult to claim that these two fields fall under the internal or external jurisdiction of the Canadian provinces. However, it must be recognized that the expansion of Quebec’s international activity during the past 50 years, combined with the broadening of the themes covered by economic integration agreements, have brought Quebec to play a significant role within the international economic and commercial arenas. Through its implementation powers for the contents of international agreements, derived from the legislative jurisdiction it holds, Quebec has been involved in numerous manners in the negotiation of important economic partnership agreements, such as theComprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) signed between Canada and the European Union. Quebec was also closely involved in the resolution of important commercial disputes to which Canada was a party before the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization or before bodies created under NAFTA. Similarly, the province was consulted for the resolution of complaints brought by foreign investors in the framework of investor-state arbitrations. Quebec’s international activity in economic and commercial matters has also manifested itself through the signature of intergovernmental agreements on public markets or the creation of a North American carbon market. Quebec has progressively developed and increased its influence on the elaboration and implementation of commercial agreements. Hopefully, the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, during which Canadian provinces were largely relegated to the sidelines, do not herald a setback in this respect.

This article synthesizes the results of two analyses, one at a macro and the second at the micro level, to shed new light on the process of international socialization. More particularly, the first analysis examines the seeming adoption of intellectual property norms at the state-level while the second looks at the internalization of similar norms at the individual decision-maker level. Both pay special attention to foreign education and capacity building courses as carriers of US norms to developing countries. By triangulating the results of these analyses, we gain a more precise picture of international socialization processes than analyses centered at only one level. It becomes possible to distinguish between socialization types (acculturation or persuasion) and idea types (causal or normative beliefs).

The US government argues that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), concluded last October with 11 other Pacific Rim countries, “includes the most robust enforceable environment commitments of any trade agreement in history.” But is this really the case? The TPP undoubtedly goes well beyond multilateral trade rules found in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT-1994) that treats environmental protection merely as legitimate grounds for exceptions to trade liberalisation. In the last decade, however, several other bilateral and regional trade agreements have been signed containing stringent and comprehensive environmental commitments. To what extent is the TPP really ground breaking when compared with these?

Regime complexes are arrays of institutions with partially overlapping mandates and memberships. As tensions frequently arise among these institutions, there is a growing interest geared to finding strategies to reduce them. Insights from regime theory, science and technology studies, and social network analysis support the claim that “boundary organizations” – a type of organization until now overlooked in International Relations – can reduce tensions within regime complexes by generating credible, legitimate and salient knowledge, provided that their internal networks balance multiple knowledge dimensions. Building on this argument, this article offers an ex ante assessment of the recently created International Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Results from our network analysis of IPBES point to clear improvements compared with similar organizations, although major deficiencies remain. The contribution of this article is threefold. Methodologically, it introduces new conceptual and technical tools to assess the “social representativeness” of international organizations. Theoretically, it supports the claim that international organizations are penetrated by transnational networks and, consequently, that the proliferation of institutions tends to reproduce structural imbalances. Normatively, it argues that a revision of nomination processes could improve the ability of boundary organizations to generate salient, credible and legitimate knowledge.

For a long time forgotten from climate governance, local adaptation efforts have emerged in France in 2010. Territorial actors have a legal obligation to implement Climate-energy territorial Plans (PCET). These PCET have confronted them to complex adaptation challenges including locking effects during their strategic elaboration and implementation. An ontological uncertainty marks this exercise, and therefore pushes actors to reinvent their perception of territory. The study analyses how the territorial architecture, understood as the available institutional competence and knowledge of the territory, structures PCET’s adaptation approaches. It identifies leverages, room for manoeuvre as well as social and institutional barriers. As a conclusion, regularities are observed, in spite of the singularity of each actors’ mobilisation during the PCET: either adaptation is reduced to the legal minimum, or it embarks the actors in a transversal project difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, the process combines expert and non-expert knowledge along with the intention to assess the territory. To some extent, this ambition is more important than the lack of resources affected to PCETs.

How did Japan and Korea, as the rising powers of their day, transform from being “free-riders” on foreign intellectual property (IP) to being innovation-exporters and proponents of strong protection of foreign IP at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The growing literature of global IP politics has paid little attention to countries in the midst of becoming knowledge economies.Susan Sell describes the history of international IP politics as an “elaborate cat and mouse game” (2009: 2), in which developed countries chase developing countries from one institutional venue to the next in pursuit of stronger IP. We ask what would happen if, in the course of this pursuit, one of the mice progressively transformed into a cat? More specifically, in this chapter we address two questions. First, where do rising IP powers sit in multilateral negotiations? Second, what are the causal dynamics at play from the time a country resists foreign IP standards to the time it promotes strong international IP protection. The experience of Japan in the 1970–1980 and Korea in the 1980–1990 might be indicative of the direction China might take in the years to come.

By focusing on the wider process of negotiations, this novel volume presents the first systematic analysis of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The authors include scholars and practitioners from across disciplines and various academic institutions around Europe and North America, but also from outside of the transatlantic basin. While presenting a thorough examination of the process of TTIP negotiations, the volume is divided into four parts with each part examining a broader theme and offering three or four shorter exploratory chapters that are accessible to academics, students, policy-makers and a wider audience.

The volume explores historical and theoretical aspects of TTIP (with chapters by Gamble, Keohane and Morse, Telò), the beginnings of the TTIP talks and the role of individual actors (Mayer, Novotná, Dür and Lechner, Strange), TTIP’s possible knock-on effects and consequences for third parties (Aggarwal and Evenett, Duchesne and Ouellet, Zhang, Ponjaert) as well as impact on multilateral institutions and regimes complexes (Mavroidis, Mortensen, Meunier and Morin, Pauwelyn).

Endorsement:

"This volume addresses a crucial issue of global and interregional trade governance by including an international team of leading scholars from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints. Collectively the authors identify the major stakes and provide a comprehensive and highly competent overview of the main political implications of the ‘Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership’ negotiations from both sides (North America and Europe), while keeping in mind the controversial interplay with global governance and emergent economies. Highly recommended for students, scholars, practitioners and informed citizens looking for critical and solid orientation in a very sensitive and uncertain matter."

- Pascal Lamy, Honorary President of Notre Europe, former Director general of the WTO and European Commissioner for Trade

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those lawsdo not align with the country’s specific interests? This article draws on the policydiffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to give riseto those transplants in the case of asymmetric interests. While the literature presents thesemechanisms independently, this article argues that each works in combination with theothers to facilitate legal transplantation. The empirical demonstration is based on aquantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP), andincorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over 14 years. Our results suggest that, while one mechanism – coercion – is instrumental in initiatingthe transplantation process, it fades over time and is largely supplanted by three others:contractualization, socialization and regulatory competition acting in a mutuallysupportive manner. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism,acknowledging multi-causality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensiveexplanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutualreinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply ranking their relative contributions.

The first section of this introduction arranges the four theoretical approaches and methods presented in the special issues – namely interpretative constructivism, post-structuralism, discursive institutionalism (DI) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) – along two dimensions: a) the role of discourse in the constitution of the world, depending on whether approaches perceive social structure as being constitutive of or constituted by discourse; and b) interpretation of the weight of material and ideational elements in discourses. This model helps us make sense of the profound theoretical diversity that characterises analytical approaches to International Relations discourse. The second section tackles the question of ‘who does the speaking.’ It identifies the different voices that converge in the EU's international choir and problematises the discursive environment that forges international discourses through the theoretical lenses of selected approaches. In the last section, the contributions to this special issue are presented

The global intellectual property (IP) regime is in the midst of a paradigm shift in favor of greater access to protected work. Current explanations of this paradigm shift emphasize the agency of transnational advocacy networks, but ignore the role of academics. Scholars interested by global IP politics have failed to engage in reflexive thinking. Building on the results from a survey of 1,679 IP experts, this article argues that a community of academics successfully broke the policy monopoly of practitioners over IP expertise. They instilled some skepticism concerning the social and economic impacts of IP among their students as well as in the broader community of IP experts. They also provided expert knowledge that was widely amplified by NGOs and some intergovernmental organizations, acting as echo chambers to reach national decision makers. By making these claims, this article illustrates how epistemic communities actively collaborate with other transnational networks rather than competing with them, and how they can promote a paradigm change by generating rather than reducing uncertainty.

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themescovered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions.

This study argues that ‘regime complexes’ and ‘policy coherence’ are two faces of thesame integrative process. The development of regime complexes co-evolves with the pressureson decision makers to coordinate their policies in various issue-areas. Conceptually, we intro-duce a typology of policy coherency (erratic, strategic, functionalistic, and systemic) accordingto its procedural and substantive components. Empirically, by triangulating quantitative andqualitative data, we use this typology for the case of the genetic resources’ regime complex toillustrate the links between regime complexes and policy coherency. Our results suggest that acoherent policymaking process favours integrated regime complexes, while greater exposure toa regime complex increases the pressure to have a coherent policymaking. This study ﬁlls a gapin the literature on regime complexes by providing a micro-macro model linking structure toagency.

"This volume provides an essential glossary of critical terms and concepts in the field of international environmental politics for diplomats, analysts and students. The interdisciplinary array of expert authors provide terse and authoritative overview of the key concepts and debates that have defined the field of international environmental governance over the years. The entries carefully survey the intellectual ecosystem of the concepts applied to understanding and managing our global environmental crisis."

– Peter M. Haas, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

"In a truly unique way, this book helps to connect the dots and navigate between the concepts, ideas and schools of thought in global environmental policy today. As environmental issues climb higher on the global agenda, I would highly recommend this book to all who wish to better understand the insights of sustainable global governance."

– Connie Hedegaard, European Union Commissioner for Climate Action

"The global community is at a crossroads in respect to addressing climate change. A solid understanding of global environmental governance empowers people to better shape positive democracy that determines a safer future. This book makes a valuable contribution to societal understanding and societal change. Those who care about the world we leave to our children should take inspiration from its many and varied contributors drawn from so many disparate but interlocking disciplines."

"Honouring both the plurality and fecundity that characterises discursive approaches, this book demonstrates the pertinence of focussing on discourses, in their many different hues, for understanding one of the most salient developments of the contemporary international system: the production, reproduction and transformation of Europe." - Charlotte Epstein, University of Sydney

‘"With its unique collection of essays, this book celebrates two kinds of diversity: the highly diverse discursive environment that constitutes the EU's multifaceted identities, and the many academic approaches to analysing these multiple intersecting narratives." - Kalypso Nicolaïdis, University of Oxford

‘"his book represents an excellent contribution to the literature. First, it unpacks discourse analysis and demonstrates the diversity of the various discursive approaches. Second, it uses these discourse analytical lenses to shed new light on EU foreign policy" - Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin

"EU Foreign Policy through the Lens of Discourse Analysis is the most comprehensive collection to date covering the broad array of discourse analytic approaches to the study of international relations and foreign policy" - Roxanne Lynn Doty, Arizona State University

This forum presents innovative concepts and nsights emanating from Global Environmental Governance (GEG) that could be enlightening for IR in general. It brings together scholars from various disciplines, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological orientation, but all active in the subfield of GEG. Together, they review recent conceptual innovations from GEG, hypothesize on the reasons why GEG played a pioneer role for them, and assess their external validity for other IR subfields. They successively discuss (1) lawmaking techniques, (2) institutional interactions, (3) scaling and vertical linkages, (4 )private authority, (5) boundary organizations at the interface of science and politics, (6) openness and disclosure, (7) and regime effectiveness.

This paper examines an overlooked yet critical dimension of global IP governance: where do IP ideas and beliefs originate and how are they transmitted? This is the first empirical study that seeks to answer these questions presenting the findings of a survey completed by more than 1600 IP professionals, and drawing some policyrelevant implications. In this regard, the study shows that IP debates, often pictured as opposing those holding anti-IP views in the South to those supporting pro-IP maximalist views in the North, are in reality more complex and nuanced. IP professionals appear loosely organized in transnational networks where professional affiliation is more important in shaping views on IP than country of birth. The study also emphasizes the important role of higher education and capacity building in the transmission of IP ideas and beliefs. It finds that university education in a developed country is more likely to result in stronger support for a more balanced approach to IP protection and it suggests that capacity building programs might be more effective if they are supported by empirical evidence.

In the last thirty years, the study of international environmental politics has grownamongst a vast array of debates, and its theoretical innovations have matured. Theseinnovations are rooted in more general international relations theories but areespecially designed for the understanding and explanation of global environmentalgovernance. This chapter presents some of them, with a special focus on collectiveaction problems, the design of international institutions, interactions among variousinternational actors, and the evolution of prevalent discourses. Substantial work has been conducted in global environmental politics on the concept of ecologicalinterdependence, the analysis of regimes complexes, the effectiveness of public- private partnerships, and the hegemony of the liberal paradigm. In turn, thesetheoretical developments from global environmental politics can contribute to otherstreams of literature in international relations.

To what extent does the imbrication of TTIP in the existing trade and investment complex shape the negotiations? In turn, does TTIP have the potential to shape the rest of the complex moving forward? Our central argument is that TTIP negotiators face both learning constraints and learning opportunities as a result of the trade and investment complex, which will not only influence the current negation process but also the potential outcome of negotiations. The first section of this chapter portrays the ever growing trade and investment complex in which TTIP is being negotiated. The second section analyzes the constraints and opportunities faced by TTIP negotiators. The third section explores some of the negotiators’ strategic calculations as they internalize the impact of the dense regime complex. The conclusion suggests implications of TTIP on the rest of the trade and investment complex.

The study of GEG can contribute toward debunking a persistent – but rarely explicit – myth, sometimes called the “linear model” or the “rational instrumental approach”. According to this myth, expert knowledge – that encompasses but is not limited to scientific knowledge – should precede politics. As such, GEG has significant theoretical and policy contributions to offer to other subfields of IR, such as international political economy. Constructivist scholarship so rarely claims policy-relevance that it would be unfortunate not to pay attention.

This forum presents innovative concepts and insights emanating from Global Environmental Governance (GEG) that could be enlightening for IR in general. It brings together scholars from various disciplines, based on three continents, with different theoretical and methodological orientation, but all active in the subfield of GEG. Together, they review recent conceptual innovations from GEG, hypothesize on the reasons why GEG played a pioneer role for them, and assess their external validity for other IR subfields. They successively discuss (1) law making techniques, (2) institutional interactions, (3) scaling and vertical linkages, (4 )private authority, (5) boundary organizations at the interface of science and politics, (6) openness and disclosure, (7) and regime effectiveness.

This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the negotiation of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union. It argues that traditional accounts of the structure of trade negotiations must be tailored for their novel nature, especially their wider scope on various regulatory issues and the relative economic weight symmetry of trading partners. To build our argument, we revisit traditional structural factors such as economic interdependence, non-agreement alternatives (NAA), institutional constraints, outcome valuations, and domestic support. We conclude that current and future bilateral trade negotiations will likely last longer, deadlocks will likely become more frequent, and that variations in scope will likely increase.

This article looks at regime complexes from a state policymaking perspective. It develops a theoretical model in which regime complexes become denser over time while governmental policymaking becomes more coherent. Under this model, interactions between global regime complexes and national policymaking are twofold. On the one hand, greater policy coherence generates negotiated mandates asking for regime connections and complex density. On the other hand, regime-complex density creates more cohesive audiences, which increase incentives for national policy coherence. This coadjustments model brings states into the discussion of institutional interactions and critically questions the desirability and feasibility of recent calls for joined-up government and whole-of-government approaches. KEYWORDS: regime, complexity, policy coherency, substantive coherence, procedural coherence, political audience, life cycle.

Understanding the impact of regime complexes on global governance calls for creative policy thinking. This introduction provides a new and more precise definition of the concept of regime complex. It also suggests specific tools to characterize regime complexes and analyze their impacts on global governance. The articles in this issue deepen the analytical understanding of complexes by examining concrete examples in various domains of global governance such as piracy, taxation, energy, food security, emissions reduction, carbon sinks, biosafety, and refugee governance. In addition to providing an in-depth description of a variety of different regime complexes, this issue is innovative on three accounts: (1) it presents complexes as both barriers and opportunities for global governance and gives explanations for these diverse outcomes; (2) it shows how a broad spectrum of actors is necessary for understanding the creation and evolution of complexes; and (3) it qualifies former claims to the effect that only powerful actors can impact regime complexes. Keywords: regime complexes,networks, institutional centralization, institutional fragmentation, institutional density.

2012

It is a vast understatement to say that the problem of access to medicines in developing countries is complex. Access is limited by a range of factors including inability to pay, a lack of infrastructure, and corruption in some countries. Surrounding and exacerbating these structural and technological problems is the layer of legal rights created by patents and their licensing that complicate and render more expensive the preparation and delivery of needed medicines, particularly those that need to be adapted to the social, health and cultural environment of developing countries. This article provides a survey of innovative strategies that aim at maximizing the potential of patents to facilitate the development and delivery of medicines against diseases, the burden of which falls principally on developing country populations. To understand the context in which these strategies are being proposed and implemented, the article reviews the battles over access to medicines beginning in the late 1980s. It then surveys some of the principal suggestions put forward to better direct innovation systems in addressing the critical health needs of the world’s majority including advance market commitments, patent buy-outs, prize funds, public–private partnerships and patent pools.

This article focuses on the intersection of health and one of the main drivers of the global economy, intellectual property. It is widely recognized that IP is an inter-sectoral issue with linkages to many other important public policy areas, such as health, agriculture, the environment, and education. In inter-sectoral issues such as IP, there is discussion on the need for governments around the world to achieve policy coherence not only across their various departments, but also between their domestic and international positions in important fora. To appreciate better the complexity of achieving policy coherence, this article first gives a multidisciplinary view of policy coherence and then provides the Canadian context for the debate. Next, it describes three examples at the border of public health and intellectual property in Canada and internationally: (1) health innovation and access to medicines in developing countries; (2) traditional knowledge (medicinal); and (3) pandemic influenza preparedness. Finally, the article discuses international experiences with a variety of mechanisms for achieving policy coherence in IP and health, including the practice of advisory groups, multi-stakeholder dialogue, inter-departmental coordination mechanisms, broad delegations for international meetings, and white papers. From this review, a few observations can be made. First, effective coordination requires two main factors: leadership and a permanent institution that can build trust. While inter-ministerial coordination is a widely used process for policy coherence, it is not always successful. Indeed, the lack of leadership in inter-ministerial coordination has strongly constrained policy coherence.

Why some developing countries adopt US-style IP rules that go beyond those required by the TRIPs agreement.? With this paper, we contribute to the disentanglement of this puzzling situation in two manners. First, we explore one often neglected reason for the adoption of US-style rules, i.e. the socialization of decision-makers in the adopting country through interaction with experts in US IP law. Second, we rely on a more systematic conceptualization and measurement of variables than has been adopted in many previous studies. Overall, we bring forward strong quantitative evidence that socialization is a significant force in the export and import of IP rules.

Why and how do issues expire? This paper applies the concept of path dependency to issuelife cycle and argues that the manner in which an issue dies is closely associated with how it comes to life. This paper argues that, on the access to medicines issue, the first actors (1) to have called attention to a legal problem, (2) to have capitalised on the HIV/AIDs crisis, and (3) to have used the example of Africa, were also the first to have felt constrained by their own frame in their attempt to (1) look for economical rather than legal solutions, (2) expand the list of medicines covered beyond anti-AIDs drugs, and (3) allow large emerging economies to benefit from a scheme designed by countries without manufacturing capacities. In order to escape an issue in which they felt entrapped, issue entrepreneurs worked strategically to close the debate in order to better reframe it in other forums.

The rapid emergence of transnational networks in world politics calls for an analysis of their power dynamics. By combining the advocacy network literature and the two-level game theory in an innovative manner, this paper provides a theoretical conceptualization of the interplay between intra- and inter-network interactions. It argues that the strength of networks as agent springs from their force as a structure. A network win-set is determined by its internal games, thereby affecting both its bargaining power and its chance to reach a consensual agreement with other networks. The issue of access to medicines is used as a factual background to illustrate how the flow of influence within networks affects influence among networks.

While the WTO secretariat, key delegations, several NGOs, and industry publicly present the 30 August 2003 WTO Decision as an attempt to reconcile intellectual property with access to medicines, our research shows otherwise. We draw on qualitative analyses of 54 interviews and a lexicometric analysis of press releases to show that their enthusiastic public statements contrast deeply with their internal, cynical beliefs. Most of these actors not only consider the WTO Decision to be fundamentally flawed but claim to have known this prior to its adoption. We argue that a procedural norm of consensus-seeking impeded traditional bargaining over this sensitive issue and that distrust among participants hindered truthseeking deliberation. Caught between strategic and communicative actions, state and non state actors found themselves trapped in their own rhetoric of reconciling intellectual property with access to medicines. They realized that the appearance of a solution, rather than a functional solution, provided the only realistic outcome to a fruitless and publicly damaging continuation of debate. From a theoretical perspective, this case study sheds a new light on the gray zone between rational choice theory and constructivism, where both discourse and strategies matter. From an empirical perspective, it illustrates the risk of seeking consensus within international regimes when the procedural norm of consensus coexists with a high level of distrust.

Canada was the first country to implement the WTO Decision of August 30, 2003, authorizing the export of generic drugs manufactured under a compulsory license to developing countries in response to a proposal brought forward by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that now claim dissatisfaction with the Canadian legislation. This empirical case study examines what success means for an NGO campaign. It contrasts interviews, documents, media coverage, and public statements of stakeholders, using quantitative and qualitative analyses. It concludes the NGO network experienced a shift from a mobilizer of public sentiment at the international level to a policy adviser at the domestic level. This shift crystallized a change in leadership toward local, rather than transnational NGOs, and a shift in strategy from being radical to more reformist. While this process of institutionalizing the outcomes of international campaigns is necessary for the implementation of international norms into domestic policy, it required NGOs to compromise their ideal positions, producing some objective successes in legislative reform but subjective dissatisfaction of the NGOs in the failure of Canada’s domestic regime to enhance access to medicines on the ground in developing countries.

2009

This paper examines the current wave of US bilateral agreements with respect to their strategic and political value at the plurilateral level. The US government has explicitly recognized its objective of leveraging bilateral agreements in order to influence regional and multilateral negotiations. Although it may be too early to assess the full effectiveness of this US strategy, the paper argues that there are clear signs that the exploitation of bilateral agreements will not independently achieve the goal of strengthening plurilateral patent norms. This finding is supported by an assessment of six potential roads from bilateralism to plurilateralism: chain reaction, pressure for inclusion, coalition building, emulation, legal interpretation, and adherence. The assertion that bilateral trade deals have a great impact on international patent lawmaking, made both by proponents and critics of TRIPs-Plus agreements, is unsubstantiated. The author concludes that the US Government Accountability Office and Congress are justified in questioning whether the negotiation of these bilateral agreements, at least in the realm of IP law, is a wise investment of US Trade Representative’s resources.

2008

Due to scientific uncertainties and political problems, policymakers rely on socially constructed norms when drafting what they hope to be an efficient patent system. At the international level, ethical discourse is often used by stakeholders to promote their favoured norms and thus causing a “rhetorical war” in the international patent regime. This article introduces the evolution of key discourses in the history of the international patent regime, especially in regard to the biodiversity and the access to medicines debates. It leads to concluding remarks on the effectiveness of some discourses over others in framing international patent debates.

2007

Most efforts to negotiate a multilateral agreement on the liberalization and protection of investment have failed despite the fact that there are more than 2,400 bilateral investment treaties in existence. We have coined this phenomenon the “lateralism paradox.” Within this article, we consider five hypotheses that focus respectively on power asymmetries, incentives for defection, strategic linkages, domestic constraints, and ongoing adaptation. We found that the first four explanations are not supported by empirical evidence from the post-NAFTA period. We conclude that bilateralism appears to be the only feasible approach for negotiating investment rules, as well as the most sensible process to ensure continuous and dynamic adaptation.

2006

Access to medicine is at the forefront of multilateral debates surrounding the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). This paper argues that bilateralism allows the United States to circumvent these debates and to set standards that serve and protect the pharmaceutical industry. In addition to the TRIPs requirements, recentlyconcluded US Free Trade Agreements (FTA) prescribe the patentability of new uses of known medicines, strengthen the protection of undisclosed data, extend the term of protection to compensate administrative procedures, prohibit some exceptions to the conferred rights, define circumstances for compulsory licensing, proscribe the doctrine of international exhaustion, and restrict the grounds for revocation. Although these “TRIPs-plus provisions” are not incompatible with the Doha Declaration on Public Health, they are additional barriers for the entry of generic medicines.

Twelve years after the inception of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US policy on the protection of foreign investment is evolving. This article compares the provisions on investment in the recent US free trade agreements (FTAs) and the 2004 model bilateral investment treaty (BIT) with NAFTA’s. While most of the provisions are similar, some differences can be identified, both in substantive and procedural forms. We explain this evolution by a learning process of the US administration from the NAFTA experience. We argue that the new features of the FTAs and of the revised model BIT result from the US interest in reaching a better balance between the protection of investment and the protection of state sovereignty. This American concern stems from a reaction to the claims filed by foreign investors under NAFTA Chapter 11, at least some of which were perceived as ‘frivolous’ by the US government. However, the recent US FTAs and model BIT do not reveal a thorough policy reorientation but rather adjustments to the policy at the basis of NAFTA’s investment chapter.

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is no longer the «new frontier» of theinternational patent regime. Indeed, the United States and other developed countriesnegotiate bilateral «TRIPs-plus» treaties with developing countries. Arguably,bilateralism allows to bypass the dead-end debates at the TRIPs Council and to build alliances for upcoming multilateral negotiations at the World Intellectual PropertyOrganization. This article compares patentability provisions of the recently-concluded U.S. Free Trade Agreements with the TRIPs Agreement. Although most of the provisions of the TRIPs Agreement are integrated in bilateraltreaties, we identify five significant changes: 1) bilateral treaties provide a 12 months grace period to inventors; 2) the industrial application requirement isdefined has a «specific, substantial, and credible utility»; 3) a ceiling to thedisclosure requirement is introduced; 4) the plant protection regime is reinforced; 5) the non-discrimination rule is omitted.Our comparative analysis shows that bilateralism allows the US to consolidateexisting multilateral treaties, such as the TRIPs Agreement and the UPOV Conven-tion, and to fortify its negotiating position for future multilateral treaties, such as theWIPO Substantive Patent Law Treaty. The new features of bilateral treaties indicatethat the international patent regime is still oriented through the US patent law model.